I found some notes from a business consultancy firm on improving organizational effectiveness, and I found it cute and convenient and very applicable to personal life. So I thought I’d do just that. There’s nothing in there that we don’t already know, no information that’s actually worth paying for (and I continue to find it ridiculous that people do!), but it is less trouble to work with existing frameworks than to start from scratch. I decided to take some liberties with it, changing terms and definitions as I saw fit, until it no longer resembled the original. I’m going to turn all the bullets into proper pages, and turn this into a sort of game, a challenge to reduce waste in my life.

Defects:
Damaging outcomes. Create  delays, incur costs to correct.

• Illness
• Sleep Deprivation
• Injuries
• Unproductive Days
• Frustration With Detours

Processing:
Performing tasks ineffectively, or performing unnecessary tasks altogether.

• Information Obsession
• Lack of focus
• Wasting time on Facebook
• Lack of clear step-by-step plan resulting in disproportionate, unnecessary and often repeated amounts of error in trial
• Spending too much time being perfectionist about early-stage work

Downtime:
Time spent waiting idly.

• bottlenecks, waiting for something to do, waiting to be served
• Downtime spent travelling, waiting at work
• Stoning in front of the computer

Inventory:
Excess inventory takes up time, space and weighs down the mind.

• Books
• Clothes
• Online

Transportation:
Traveling unnecessarily.

• Idiot-Tax Taxis
• Making unnecessary trips to buy stuff when they could’ve been planned

Over-consuming/Overproducing (Disequilibrium)
Performing non-essential tasks; producing more, too early, too quickly, wasting resources.

• Smoking too much
• Spending too much
• Talking too much

Misusing Human Potential:
No elaboration necessary.

• Upsetting girlfriend by being irresponsible/insensitive
• Not requesting criticism, and not taking it as well as I should
• Unnecessary arguments online (inconsequential)
• Spending too long/too often just bumming around with friends (quality>quantity)
• investing too randomly/inefficiently in dead-end people